Alice Oswald on the Devonshire landscape: 'There's a terror in beauty'

Poet Alice Oswald takes Madeleine Bunting on her favourite walk through the Devonshire countryside to discuss the colonization of landscape, the limitations of pastoral language and the influence of oral poetry on her work

Battleground for survival … the river Dart in Devon. Photograph: Alamy

Alice Oswald on the Devonshire landscape: 'There's a terror in beauty'

Poet Alice Oswald takes Madeleine Bunting on her favourite walk through the Devonshire countryside to discuss the colonization of landscape, the limitations of pastoral language and the influence of oral poetry on her work

Friday 13 July 2012 07.17 EDT
First published on Friday 13 July 2012 07.17 EDT

It's not long before I can't think how to frame a question. Alice Oswald, the poet, is taking us on her favourite walk – one she tries to do every day – to a point where two tidal rivers, the Dart and the Harbourne, converge. The problem is we are walking along an enchanting path bordered with hedgerows thick with flowers, the bluebells are in bloom in the woods alongside and the pastures on the hills across the river are a heady spring green in the brilliant sunshine. But Oswald has firmly banned words such as pretty or idyllic. We find a compromise – I'm allowed to use the word "beautiful" because in Oswald's view "there's a kind of terror in beauty that I can cope with".

She concedes she is being dictatorial but, faced with the way in which this kind of Devon landscape has been romanticised, she argues she has no option. We are walking through the kind of picturesque nature used to sell dairy products and Oswald's response is fierce.

"I'm continually smashing down the nostalgia in my head. And I am trying to enquire of the landscape itself what it feels about itself rather than bringing in advertising skills. There's a whole range of words that people use about landscape. Pastoral? Idyll? I can't stand them.

"Yes, we were walking through stitchwort, wild garlic, campion, blue bells and buttercups. The most extraordinary colours, but I have to force my eye behind the flower. I have this exercise where I force myself to look out from the flower's point of view at these great walloping humans coming down the path, and try, just try and feel it from their point of view because it's a different world to them, a fascinating hard one."

Seen through Oswald's eyes, this gently rolling Devon countryside is a battleground for survival: each plant fighting for light in the crowded hedgerow; the trees whose roots cling to the river bank engaged in an epic struggle for life. A walk with Oswald is never going to be peaceful – she says she's allergic to the word.

"You say I'm fierce but I think you have to be. We are in the most extraordinary moment [of environmental crisis] and we cannot afford to be complacent. It is a kind of day-long effort to get your mind into the right position to live and speak well."

What irritates Oswald is that when we use a word such as "pretty" to describe it, we strip nature of its independence. "We're colonizing it. We're turning it into something human rather than what it is for itself. That spreads very quickly into the whole of your life and you then can begin to lead a kind of inert life of colonizing other people – colonizing everything. That's what I am working against."

Even the idea of mapping a landscape has become a suspect impulse, she argues. Naming becomes a form of "conquering a place"; once it is named, you don't look at it any more. She once spent time trying to learn the names of stars but realised that having named them, she stopped looking at them.

"This might seem like the river Harbourne but it's really a weird abstract alien stuff called water. I exert incredible amounts of energy in trying to see things from their own point of view rather than the human point of view."

When I point out the intellectual ambition of this and add that Oswald is deliberately trying to unpick over 200 years of the English tradition of the picturesque as the predominant way of thinking about landscape, she laughs.

"There's a lot of rage in my head. I like the friction that means there is nothing relaxing about writing a poem. I can't afford to relax in any area of life. You have to keep your senses awake to all the complacency that kicks in particularly for the English."

As Oswald drove us from Totnes station, we had been talking about this area of Devon's long association with a violent history of piracy and sugar plantations. Some of the surrounding estates were built on the profits of imperial exploitation. Now it's the preserve of the rich and privileged for holiday homes and weekend cottages.

"Peace here was quite often bought at the expense of smashing up some other part of the world. And these beautiful rich rolling estates that we think of as the English countryside are quite often based on illegal activities of some kind."

There was also the struggle of farmers and fishermen to make a living, often with considerable hardship and it's those "democratic voices" which interest Oswald. They echo the struggle of every other living thing from the blackbird hunting for food in winter to the oyster in the river mud.

Disregarding this struggle and hardship endemic in the landscape is the start of a slippery slope:

"I think it is the easiest mentality for a human being to be either colonized or to colonize. The structure of either the slave or the master seems to be the simplest and the most relaxing one to slip into. Either you are a slave and you don't have to think for yourself or you're a master and you don't have to work for yourself. And there's a tiny pinprick point in the middle where you're responsible for yourself, and you understand other people's responsibilities and rights. That is the point that I think you have to attain continually in your conscious mind …"

Oswald stops suddenly and laughs at herself: "I'm sounding pompous."

What's emerging in short, passionately intense bursts during the several hours we spend on the walk is a kind of political manifesto. She mentions that she travelled up to camp with the Occupy movement at St Paul's on London last autumn and is deeply admiring of the left-wing philosopher Slavoj Žižek. So how does all this feed into her poetry?

"I was first drawn towards this understanding of master and slave through being immersed in Homeric poetry. I think you can feel back through it into a much more democratic way of seeing the world where there is a kind of consciousness at the point of energy in each thing you come across."

Oswald describes discovering Homer as a teenager during lunch hours with a remarkable teacher. The inspiration now is as strong as ever – her most recent collection Memorial is a "translation of the Iliad". She wants her poetry to be spoken rather than read so that it becomes an event rather than just words on the page, and as such it can have a physical effect on the listener. Oral poetry such as that of Homer, "exist as forms of breath, of sound".

"My ideal has always been to create a sound world. So I'm continually referring everything to the ears and the voice and the channels between. That's what language is really. The words are the sound recordings of whatever you see or smell or taste."

Her booklength poem Dart was about capturing the sounds of the river and its inhabitants; it is never about image. She says she has "done quite a lot of work trying to get away from the eyes and into the ears." Sound offers more depth and resonance than our eyes can offer.

We have reached the confluence of the river Dart and the Harborne and Oswald likens our short walk to the achievement of finishing a poem. It's an invigorating exposure to a constantly changing landscape of tidal mudflats, surging currents of water and its restlessness, Oswald, suggests makes her feel at home.